William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen.
An edition of Stoner
(1965)
Stoner
Vintage Classics edition (40)
by John Williams
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William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely.
Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.
--back cover
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Stoner: Roman
2014, Dt. Taschenbuch-Verl., Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag
in German
3423143959 9783423143950
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Stoner
2012, Vintage Books
Paperback
in English
- Vintage Classics edition (40)
0099561549 9780099561545
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Stoner
2006, New York Review Books
Trade Paperback
in English
- 6th printing
1590171993 9781590171998
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Book Details
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"This book is dedicated to my friends and former colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Missouri."
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William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
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